


Twice Shy

by nuricurry



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-11
Updated: 2015-05-11
Packaged: 2018-03-30 02:01:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3918700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuricurry/pseuds/nuricurry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As that old saying goes, "once bitten, twice shy." Living with the past is almost as hard as surviving it. Implied Sherry/Jake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twice Shy

He’s still sensitive to being touched. The first time she reached out for his shoulder without giving him warning first– just a call of his name, an announcement of her presence beside him– he had recoiled from her, before swinging out with the edge of his elbow. It was a move meant to hurt, one that was supposed to get someone away from him, and it worked, because she had to jump back, or risk having her nose broken (no matter how quickly she could heal, that didn’t mean she was exactly fond of experiencing pain). Seeing it was her, she watched his eyes go wide for a moment, and then it was he who took a step back, away from her, and away from the blow he almost dealt her. He didn’t apologize, only muttered a gruff retort about her ‘sneaking up’ on him, and he refused to talk about it any further than that.

The next time, he had been asleep in the bunker beside her, his head tipped back against the wall and drool trailing down the corner of his mouth. They were napping in shifts, waiting out the infestation outside the concrete walls, too many B.O.W.s and not enough ammo to charge their way through. She turned to wake him up for his turn to keep watch, her head having been nodding for the past hour, and the yawns coming too frequently to ignore. The moment her fingers brushed against his shoulder, his body seized, and this time, she was ready for him to grab her by the collar, and yank her down onto the ground, pinning her underneath him, as he moved on top of her, clenched fist at the ready. Once again, he realized who she was, and immediately pulled off, releasing her now torn shirt, and sitting back, so his weight wasn’t holding her down any longer. “Sorry,” he actually bothered to apologize that time, but still avoided eye contact with her, “Just a bit on edge. You know how it is,” he muttered, and jerked his head to the barricaded door a few feet away from them. “Never can sleep too well when it smells like shit 'n roadkill,” he attempted a joke, one that she didn’t respond to.

“I do understand, Jake,” she told him, and her tone made him look towards her, “I know that it bothered you. I understand, they did it to me too. The needles, the experiments, the–”

“That’s not what I’m talking about!” he snapped at her, cutting her off, “I told you, it’s just these fucking ugly bitches clawing at the walls outside! That has nothing to do with it! Don’t be fucking stupid, I don’t care about that.”

She didn’t flinch when he yelled, and she didn’t believe him when he lied. “Yes, you do. I know, because I’ve been there too.” Her voice remained calm, and even. If he assumed she would back down because he yelled at her, that if he dismissed it loudly enough that she’d leave it, she proved him wrong, by stating firmly once again, “I understand.”

She pushed up her sleeve, and showed him the inside of her arm, where there was the crease of her elbow. Against that span of skin, was a scar, a little hole that turned into a jagged line. She showed that scar to him, making sure he looked at it, before she continued. “They took my blood as much as possible. Three, four times a day, if they had to. Because I kept healing, they felt they could do it as much as they want, and it wouldn’t matter. Technically, I guess it didn’t. But still, it mattered to me.” She dropped her sleeve again, but only so that she could reach up towards the collar of her shirt, and pull it down just enough to reveal a bit of her collarbone, and shoulder beside it. There was another scar there, bigger than the last, oddly shaped in a near perfect square. “Tissue analysis,” she explained, before he could ask, “And then, they tried a skin graft. They wanted to see what would happen, if a foreign body was introduced.” All of it was relayed with perfected ease, a cool demeanor that she learned to use, when talking about it. He wasn’t looking at her again, and she sensed she knew why. “I know why you hate it when someone grabs you, why your mind only goes to one place, when you feel someone put their hands on you. I know Jake, because I’ve been there.”

Not just in China, not just since they had met. Since she was a child, and her father used her, to seal his legacy. She could recall hours of crying and nights left alone in a sterile laboratory room, every part of her body attached to some machine, taking what parts of her they could, hoping they could use them. She had been poked and prodded and cut and abused, and she knew more than anyone the sort of effect that it could have on a person. When he jerked away from her touch, when he turned round, not seeing _her_ in that moment, not seeing Sherry but the doctors and scientists and everyone else who had held him down in order to take from him, she knew what it was like, because her life had been the same. She had just been at it much longer than he had, and knew how to put up better with it by now, after years of practice.

There was silence between them for a long moment, Jake’s eyes distant, and hers waiting for him to look up. It was as she followed the line of his scar for the forth time that he opened his mouth again, and murmured, “So, when does it get over with?” She only smiled at him, and shook her head.

“It doesn’t,” she said, and he turned to her with a look of anger, laced with frustration, “but, It does get easier. Once you trust people,” she confided in him, another remark that seemed to leave him speechless. For a second, she thought that was the end of it, until Jake let out a snort then, and leaned his head back to rest against the wall again.

“I guess Supergirl does need her kryptonite,” he quipped, and she rolled her eyes, even as she let out a laugh.


End file.
